Noir Diary # 11: T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)

Whilst I’m sure that more learned film scholars than I must have addressed this issue at length in books I haven’t read, it’s fairly clear that the initial, early ‘40s, iteration of Hollywood Film Noir underwent something of a sea-change in the immediate post-war years, as brimstone-tinged, nouveau riche melodramas in the Double Indemnity / ‘Laura’ mould were increasingly phased out in favour of more straight-down-the-line police / underworld procedurals. 

Though the fatalism and alienation which subsequently became recognised as signifiers of the ‘noir’ worldview remained intact, the work-a-day, proletarian outlook of these post-war crime flicks in some sense harked back to the Warner Bros gangster epics of the early ‘30s, albeit with an aspiration toward ‘documentary realism’ supplanting the snarling, comic book mayhem proffered by Cagney and Robinson. 

With its ground-breaking use of authentic urban location shooting, Jules Dassin’s ‘The Naked City’ (1948) is often held up as the ‘trigger film’ for this wave of ‘realist’ noir, but by that point the trend already seems to have been well underway around the margins of the industry by the time Anthony Mann laid down the preceding year’s ‘T-Men’ for freelance producer Edward Small. 

Released outside of the studio system by distributor Eagle-Lion, this remorselessly glum tale of two undercover U.S. Treasury agents infiltrating a Detroit crime syndicate in order to help take down a Los Angeles counterfeiting operation is about as ‘procedural’ as a crime film can possibly get whilst still retaining the essence of noir. 

So entirely unencumbered by movie-world glamour is its utilitarian world of men in hats taking care of business in fact, it could easily have been mistaken for a crudely staged re-enactment of factual events, or an instructional film for trainee federal agents, were it not for the presence of a few ‘larger than life’ character types, and, more importantly, of John Alton’s extraordinary, expressionistic photography. 

Perhaps a direct result of its quasi-realist aesthetic, ‘T-Men’ is unfortunately also a deeply schizophrenic motion picture, and not in a good way.

Let me put it to you this way: most fans of Production Code era Hollywood will be familiar with the phenomenon of the ‘tagged on ending’, a device particularly common to crime films and thrillers, wherein some comfortingly square authority figure tends to pop up after the story’s hair-raising drama has concluded, reassuring us that all evil-doers were inevitably brought to justice by the benign powers of the law and judiciary, and that we can all return to their homes for a sound night’s sleep, unmolested by the black-hearted rogues they’ve just seen tearin’ it up on screen for the past eighty minutes (and by extension, unconcerned about the social pressures and inequalities which created them in the first place). 

Meanwhile of course, we can practically see the film’s director and writer just off screen, laughing into their sleeves and making “nothin’ to do with me buddy” gestures, confident that any halfway intelligent viewer will grok that the REAL movie ended a few minutes beforehand, with the tragic antihero expiring in a gutter with police lead in his back.

Variations on this theme include the ‘glib happy ending’, the scene-setting, ‘story-you’re-about-to-see..’ prologue and the thunderous, explanatory voiceover, and they’re basically all just a part of the accepted toing and froing which allowed filmmakers to get their visions somewhere near the screen during the first half of the 20th century. Usually this stuff doesn’t do a great deal of damage to the movie itself – it remains fairly self-contained, and can be tuned out without too much difficulty… but boy, is ‘T-Men’ ever an exception.

Let me say straight-up that if Mann had been able to make the film as a tight, sixty-minute programmer about a couple of double-agent hoods taking down a counterfeiting racket, it would have been pretty great picture – a full strength draught of hard-boiled badassery, and a pretty much perfect exemplar of the post-war b-noir form.

Padded out to eighty-six minutes though, filled with blandly-shot visits to the hard-working back office boys in Washington and ham-fisted testimonials praising the moral righteousness and ruthless efficiency of the U.S. Treasury (“there are six fingers of the Treasury Department fist, and that fist hits fair, but hard,” some functionary behind a mahogany desk absurdly informs us at one point), together with voice-of-god narration constantly crashing in to reiterate plot points and remind us of our undercover protagonists’ patriotic, crime-fighting duty and…. well, let's just say the film’s impact is somewhat compromised, to put it mildly.

Imagine watching a version of ‘Psycho’ in which Simon Oakland’s psychiatrist character kept popping up in the middle of the story to calmly talk us through Norman Bates’ thought processes and to reassure us that everything will turn out ok, and you’ll get an idea of what a frustrating viewing experience ‘T-Men’ can be.

Nonetheless though, the good stuff here is well worth sticking around for. As our ostensible lead, Dennis O’Keefe (who went on to headline in Mann’s classic ‘Raw Deal’ a year later) is such a sneering, heavy-lidded bruiser that it’s hardly surprising the producers (or whoever) felt the need to cram in narration every five minutes reminding us that he’s actually on the side of the tax-collecting angels. (He puts me in mind of a somewhat younger version of Eddie Constantine in the Lemmy Caution movies, if that helps give you a bead on where he’s coming from.)

In fact, it’s easy to imagine a version of this movie – almost certasinly a superior one, from my POV - in which O’Keefe and his associate Alfred Ryder actually are just a pair of freelance crooks trying to muscle their way into an inter-state counterfeiting operation, rather than glorified tax inspectors, but I suppose that Eagle-Lion and/or Edward Small simply weren’t brave enough to foist that kind of cynical, amoral grue upon the Code era American public – assuming that the Treasury Dept weren’t actually covertly financing this picture as a propaganda piece (which seems entirely possible, given how heavy-handed their input seems to have been).

Ryder incidentally is by far the more low-key and reserved of our two undercover men, largely remaining in the shadow of the more charismatic O’Keefe, whilst the knowledge that he has a wife and family back home pretty much puts him on the chopping block from the outset vis-à-vis providing us with the necessary emotional clout to raise the stakes for an inevitable blood-soaked finale.

The film’s earlier, Detroit-set section is pretty straight-down-the-line gangland business stuff, as grim men convene in airless brick basements and back offices to pack crates, smoke cheroots and exchange briefcases, but Mann and Alton bring a dour, smog-choked atmosphere to proceedings which hints at dark deeds and snuffed out lives lurking just around the corner. 

Things really get going though once O’Keefe is reassigned to L.A., charged with using a series of unfeasibly vague clues to track down the gang’s West Coast connection, a “shover” of counterfeit notes known only as ‘The Schemer’. (He frequents Turkish steam baths, has a scar from a knife wound on his left shoulder and imbibes a certain brand of Chinese medicinal herbs.)

Once O’Keefe dutifully enters the orbit of the weaselly, eccentric Schemer (broadly but rather brilliantly played by Wallace Ford), things take a somewhat more fanciful turn, as he follows his mark to the Club Trinidad in Ocean Park, wherein he cracks wise with an underworld-savvy hostess/photographer (Mary Meade) whose ostensible job involves her selling snaps of punters back to them, whilst meanwhile acting an all-purpose message centre for the counterfeiting gang.

“Tell me, you make a good take shooting mugs like me?,” O’Keefe asks her, before leaving her a message in the form of one of his own tailor-made phony bills, folded just so. This of course brings him to the attention of Mead’s higher-ups in the biz, represented in the first instance by an even more shady technician operating out of the back of a Hollywood photography lab.

 Though beautifully rendered by Alton, the assorted scenes of back-stabbing and thuggery which follow, including much procedural details concerning the origins of printing plates and the grading of paper etc, prove less than scintillating, as O’Keefe and Ryder gradually work their way through the ranks toward the head honchos of the counterfeiting racket, one of whom, to our considerable surprise, turns out to be… a dame!

Played by Jane Randolph (whom you may recognise as the “Alice” character in both ‘Cat People’ (1942) and its sequel), ‘Miss Simpson’ is admittedly only ‘secretary’ to the actual Big Boss (who keeps a low profile behind a locked door), but she still seems to be largely in charge of day-to-day operations, and finding a woman in a position of authority in a film as unrepentantly masculine as this one is such an unexpected development it feels almost deliberately perverse.

In fact, it’s curious to note that whilst the two female characters in ‘T-Men’ are only on screen for probably about five minutes in total, they are both interesting, unconventional figures, playing important roles in the movie’s criminal infrastructure whilst failing to conform to the expected demands of either ‘love interest’ or ‘femme fatale’ archetypes.

It’s possible that the inclusion of these characters was simply the result of a compromise between the film’s producer(s) and writer / director, allowing ‘T-Men’ to include at least some kind of female interest without diluting the film’s procedural / quasi-documentary framework by resorting to rote romantic/domestic interludes - but whatever the case, they certainly make for an interesting addition to the drama, and allow the movie to play a lot better for modern audiences than it might have done as a 100% male affair.

Once the stentorian voiceovers and Treasury Dept bullshit is all out of the way meanwhile, the legit parts of John C. Higgins’ script (‘suggested from a story by’ ubiquitous Hollywood ideas-woman Virginia Kellogg) may not exactly sparkle with verbal wit, but they do at least include enough blunt, hardboiled shop-talk to keep me entertained. (“What’s the matter, ya gettin’ the whim-whams?”, a fellow hood asks O’Keefe when he seems reluctant to embark on a murder assignment.)

Brilliantly, the character played by Jack Overman (a distinctive actor with somewhat Asian features who also appeared in both ‘Brute Force’ and ‘Force of Evil’) answers to the name of “Horizontal”, whilst other rough coves on our identity parade of a cast list include “Moxie”, “Chops” and “Shiv Triano”. If you’re a fan of good ol’ Hollywood tough guy shtick in fact, you can count ‘T-Men’ as pretty essential viewing.

The real star of the show though is of course mid-century America’s foremost poet of men in dark hats walking down shabby hotel corridors, John Alton, whose distinctive work on ‘T-Men’ single-handedly elevates the film from a fairly routine caper to a true masterwork of noir visual style.

Working a few years later on ‘The Big Combo’ (which I reviewed here), Alton famously managed to create both an airport and an opera house out of little more than a few strategically placed spotlights, some smoke and a few bit of wood and corrugated iron. Here though, he and art director Edward C. Jewell seem to have had slightly more at their disposal (including the use of real locations), and the results are often little short of extraordinary.

Few of the era’s DPs were able to add a sense of routine tough guy business quite as well as Alton does here. Throughout the film, underlit faces loom out of the shadows like horror movies ghouls, framed by beams of rusted steel or rotten wood, whilst tormented victims of beatings sprawl gigantically in the foreground of low angled shots, as groups of sweaty, behatted goons artfully cram themselves within the 4:3 frame as if they were stuck in a lift with a single flashlight.

Meanwhile, authentic downtown alleyways, gas towers and waterfront loading zones are all picked out exquisitely by Alton’s minimal, high contrast lighting, allowing his trademark looming silhouettes and distorted shadows to lend perhaps an even greater degree of expressionistic angst to the film’s visuals than he managed to conjure up back on the sound stages.

In an inspired touch, the film’s conclusion takes place aboard what appears to be a decommissioned cargo ship from whence the bad guys handle the manufacture of their counterfeit dough, and the lighting Alton manages to apply to this vessel is, as you might imagine, pretty remarkable.

Transforming the deck into a chaotic cat’s cradle of light and shadow within which harried, hunched figures dart, weave and fall through the final few minutes of climatic action, Alton seems to directly mirror the overlapping layers of urban disorder seen earlier in the film, in a number of daytime shots taken through reflection-clogged shop windows. Perhaps T-Men’s most distinctive visual motif, this sense of unfathomable chaos presents a disturbing contrast to the resolutely linear tale offered up by the film’s script.

Though it would be a stretch to call it a superior, or even particularly inspired, example of the form, ‘T-Men’s best passages nonetheless capture the absolute essence of the proletarian gangster-noir aesthetic that would define many of the most powerful examples of Film Noir to emerge from Hollywood through the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.

Certainly, the level of visual imagination on display in the film remains pretty astonishing. Both in purely technical terms and as a seamless fusion of the realist and fantastical strains of crime movie aesthetics, Alton’s work cements it as a key exemplar of the genre’s trademark atmospherics, irrespective of it’s sadly all-too-obvious drawbacks as a narrative movie entertainment.

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Noir Diary # 7: Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

“I was just a lad, nearly twenty two
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I'm lost, too late to pray…”
- Hank Williams, ‘Lost Highway’ (1949)

If the canonical ‘A List’ of ‘40s Film Noir is largely made up of relatively lavish studio pictures which were recognised as commercial and critical successes right from the out-set (‘Double Indemnity’, ‘The Big Sleep’, ‘Mildred Pierce’, and so on), the ubiquity of these “big hitters” only serves to make the corresponding ‘B-list’ - comprising lower status studio programmers, independent productions and poverty row quickies which have had to fight tooth and nail for their cult status (and indeed their very survival) across the decades – all the more alluring to the genre’s fans.

Broadly speaking, these B-Noirs were a few years behind their Hollywood counterparts, hitting their creative peak around the dawn of the ‘50s, as crime films and mysteries slid further down the movie industry food chain and the fractured disillusionment of post-war masculinity began to make its presence felt on the cultural margins, but the film which many would consider the very best of the B-Noirs – perhaps the definitive exemplar of the style, even – actually hit far earlier, having been shot whilst the war overseas still raged.

Right off the bat, it’s easy to see why 1945’s ‘Detour’ has acted as pure cat-nip for critics and cineastes over the years. The work of an enigmatic, cult director frequently name-checked in Cahiers du Cinéma, this sub-70 minute item from ‘poverty row’ mainstays PRC boasts bold, expressionistic visuals, brutally minimal plotting and a script ripped to the gills with frazzled pulp-poetic artistry - much of it spat out with psychotic fervour by hate-choked harridan Ann Savage, truly an anti-heroine for the ages. (“Who do you think you’re talking to - a hick? Listen Mister, I been around, I know a wrong guy when I see one. Whatcha do, kiss him with a wrench?”) (1)

Beyond any of those considerable pleasures however, ‘Detour’ is chiefly notable I think for the way it pushes the comfortingly moralistic metaphysics of Hollywood noir way off the deep end into pure, unmoored existential fatalism.

To not put too fine a point on it, the classic ‘man’s-decent-into-hell’ narrative of noirs in the ‘Double Indemnity’ tradition tend toward a Judeo-Christian, or even specifically Catholic, view of things. The protagonist’s journey to perdition begins from the moment his moral judgement lapses, when greed or lust temporality take control of his actions. Thereafter, he finds himself rocketing straight toward a fate which, though it may seem puritanically harsh, is not unfair within the film’s moral schema. At the end of the day, it is the characters’ own weakness which leads them to damnation; the old ‘original sin’ jive writ large.

In ‘Detour’ however, poor old Al Roberts (Tom Neal) sets out to hitchhike coast-to-coast from New York to L.A. with nothing but love in his heart, and a healthy disinterest in monetary gain. (“What was it anyway,” he asks himself as he contemplates a ten dollar tip. “A piece of paper crawling with germs. Couldn't buy anything I wanted.”)

Al’s only aim in life is to re-join his beloved fiancée in California, and the extraordinary set of circumstances which instead find him heading back east with two potential murder raps hanging over him, a dead man’s bankroll in his pocket, no legal name or identity and the harried, unshaven face of a Death Row inmate, are not his fault in any way whatsoever. They are simply the result of extremely bad luck and a few botched attempts at self-preservation. As he puts it himself, in the voiceover monologue which comprises probably the film’s most famous dialogue;

“That's life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you. […] Yes, fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.”

Who but the shadow-haunted Edgar G. Ulmer could dish out this kind of full strength Franz Kafka shit to the Great American Public a few months after VJ day, and call it entertainment? I ask you. No wonder us weirdos here in Europe love him so much.

Like many of Ulmer’s films, ‘Detour’ essentially seems to concern itself with the travails of a naïve/benevolent figure stumbling into dark and malevolent zone inhabited by weird and predatory figures who seem impossible to relate to or reason with. One minute, Al Roberts is thumbin’ a ride and dreaming of his darling, tired and dusty but unbowed. The next, he’s listening to the repellent Charles Haskell Jr (Edmund MacDonald) cheerfully declare that the wounds gauged out of his hands by a woman he recently tried to rape are going to turn into a real nice set of scars (“..there oughta be a law against dames with claws”), before he urgently requests a bottle from the glove compartment and begins chomping down some unspecified pills.

You’d imagine our protagonist must have been around the block a few times during his time as a New York nightclub pianist, but there’s nothing in the film to indicate that he’s used to dealing with this level of sleazoid craziness. (Neal’s nervous “uh, yep” responses to Haskell’s ‘locker room banter’ are great.)

More than anything, Roberts’ time with Haskell strikes me as a precursor to the kind of traumatic exposures of youthful, rational innocence to psychopathic, criminal experience which David Lynch always likes to include in his films – think Jeffrey encountering Frank for the first time in ‘Blue Velvet’, or Balthazar Getty sharing a ride with Robert Loggia’s Mr. Eddy in ‘Lost Highway’ (a film whose title would have been perfect for this film incidentally, had Hank Williams only had the good grace to record his definitive rendition of Leon Payne’s song a couple of years earlier).

And if Al thought Haskell was bad news, well… just wait until fate sticks out a particularly gangrenous foot and puts Vera (Ann Savage) in his path - good god.

In deference to standard film noir lingo, I’ve read Savage’s character described on various occasions as a ‘femme fatale’, but that designation feels both woefully off-base and laughably inadequate when it comes to trying to define Vera. No weak-assed “seductive spider luring unsuspecting men into her web” shit for this gal – she’s a full-on Amazonian destroyer right from the out-set, heart full of hate, claws at the ready and eyes black as coal.

Clearly a stronger and more lethal denizen of the same predatory netherworld that Haskell sprang from (it was she who left him with those aforementioned claw-marks), Vera is a venom-spitting, animalistic witch whom the script gifts with absolutely no redeeming qualities or sympathetic characteristics whatsoever.

We could sketch in the kind of hellish upbringing which must have led her to adopt such an unholy attitude at the tender age of twenty-four, but you’ll get little help from the script in that regard, beyond an implication (unconfirmed) that she is slowly dying from TB or some similar condition. Or, we could go for a straight misogynistic reading and blame her with dragging Roberts down to hell… except for the fact that Haskell’s death had already left him riding the Lost Highway before he even met her.

Perhaps it is best however to simply see Vera more as a personification of pure, undiluted self-preservation and material greed than as a human character, or as a demon sent forth simply to accelerate Roberts’ journey to damnation, her intersection with him merely a symptom of the randomised cruelty of the universe.

But – and it’s a BIG ‘but’ - all that I’ve written above presupposes that we believe the story Al Roberts is selling us. Another reason ‘Detour’ has remained so endlessly fascinating across the decades is that, though Ulmer never deigns to obviously signpost the idea for his audience, the film’s narrative bears all the hallmarks of what later generations of viewers will likely recognise as a classic “unreliable narrator” type deal.

Excluding the opening framing device which finds the doomed and dishevelled Roberts bemoaning his fate in a road-side diner, the entirely of ‘Detour’ is recreated for us in flashback, filtered through his subjective recollections. With this in mind, do the extraordinary circumstances which put him in the immediate proximity of two suspicious deaths whilst remaining guilt-free really, on reflection, seem remotely plausible..?

Or, are we merely seeing the stories he’s cooked up for the judge, repeated and rehearsed so many times in his mind’s eye that they’ve supplanted the more damning truth in his memory?

Once this seed of doubt is planted of course, everything we see in the film becomes suspect. Could any real person be as single-mindedly monstrous as Vera, or as unrepentantly sleazy as Haskell? And what about Al’s seemingly idyllic relationship with his sweetheart back in New York? It seems unlikely that she’d suddenly up sticks and relocate to the West Coast without prior warning, leaving him behind to do as he pleases, if things were really this rosy between the couple. Could it be that she actually made the move specifically to get away from him..?

In other words, are all of the events we see portrayed in ‘Detour’ merely the self-justifying fantasies of a character who is in fact exactly what he initially appears to be – a psychotic, delusional drifter, lost forever on the road, haunted by the ghosts of the crimes and personal failures he refuses to acknowledge?

Whether or not Ulmer consciously intended us to engage with this subjective reading of the film, we will probably never know, but for viewers who want to take the plunge, all the clues are there for the taking, right down to our narrator’s guilt-diffusing suggestions that his ‘victims’ would probably have croaked sooner or later anyway (Haskell’s pill-popping, Vera’s TB).

Viewed anew through this distorting lens, ‘Detour’ begins to feel less like a prime slab of Film Noir and more like a precocious early exemplar of the kind of reality-dissembling psychological horror which would eventually reach full flower in the ‘60s and ‘70s, in the wake of ‘Vertigo’, ‘Repulsion’, Bergman’s ‘Persona’, and Altman’s ‘Images’. (2)

Certainly, in keeping with much of Ulmer’s work, ‘Detour’ carries a heavy-lidded, narcoleptic atmosphere, instinctively signalling to us that reality is not quite what it seems. From the ludicrously fog-shrouded, consciously artificial ‘New York’ scenes, which seem to be taking place more in some featureless, oneiric void than a modern cityscape, to the slow, languorous scene transitions and heavy use of super-imposition, we’re in Uncanny Valley here right from the moment Roberts’ internal monologue takes over.

Elsewhere, Ulmer even manages to incorporate some of his beloved expressionist horror tropes into the film’s production design. The tightly directed spot-lights which illuminate Roberts’ eyes against his otherwise darkened face as he begins reminiscing in the diner seem to have come straight from Lugosi in ‘White Zombie’ (or perhaps more pertinently, Karloff in Ulmer’s ‘The Black Cat’?), whilst our first glimpse of Ann Savage, during the scene in which Al picks up her up at a deserted gas station, sees her made up as if she’s literally just risen from the grave – dirt and grease in her hair, cracked white pancake make-up and heavy shading beneath her eyes. You can almost imagine her brushing the coffin-dust off her shoulders just after the scene cuts.

That Ulmer manages to achieve this ambience whilst simultaneously anchoring the film in the dusty, blue collar realism characteristic more grounded, ‘50s style noirs – shot-on-location backwoods scrubland framing a drab world of motel cabins, gas stations, cheap suits and cardboard suitcases which defines the perimeters of transient American life – is a remarkable achievement.

I know I keep going on about him in these noir reviews, but when it comes to mapping out the treacherous horror-noir borderlands within which ‘Detour’ seedily lurks, it’s difficult not to recall the work of Jim Thompson. During the latter half of the film in particular, the kind of gruelling psychological torment which would later define Thompson’s novels becomes almost palpable, as Vera and Al are forced by the unswervable impulses of blackmail and greed to co-operate and co-exist despite being pretty much continually at each other’s throats, their mutual hatred pushing them even closer together as distrust refuses to allow either of them let the other out of their sight.

By the time we find two characters who can’t stand the sight of each other spending entire days playing cards in a stuffy, furnished apartment as they passively wait for some old man neither of them have actually met to die of natural causes… well, there is a sheer surrealistic perversity to the situation that seems to pre-empt Thompson’s frighteningly bleak sense of humour, with the European-aligned Ulmer perhaps arriving at the same destination via Kafka or Sartre.

Uniquely perhaps, the irresolvable mystery of intent behind ‘Detour’ leaves us with two films in one, each of them authentically brilliant. Even if we allow Al Roberts to take us (and himself) for suckers, we’re still left with an eye-watering shot of pure, cask strength b-noir essence – a quintessential tale of hapless rube caught up in a world that increasingly resembles a giant mousetrap, walls closing in and exits disappearing as fate inevitably leads him on toward a room full of what Vera memorably describes as “…that sweet perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers”.

And, if we call our narrator on his BS meanwhile… well, we’ll soon find ourselves descending into even darker realms, as that good old abyss begins to look back into us, reflected impossibly off the asphalt of the Lost Highway.

Poster & Lobbycards sourced via Wrong Side of the Art.
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(1) ‘Detour’s script is ostensibly credited to William Goldsmith, adapted from his own novel, though research carried out by Ulmer biographer Noah Isenberg indicates that very little of Goldsmith’s work actually made it to the screen. Instead, Ulmer (we presume) pretty much rewrote the film on the fly during shooting, entirely dropping a parallel storyline involving Roberts’ girlfriend’s travails in Hollywood and created the finished film’s tightly-locked subjective flashback structure during editing.

(2) Why do all of these films – ‘Detour’ included – have ambiguous / abstract one word titles, incidentally? Answers on a postcard, please.

Pan’s People: Experience With Evil by John Ross Macdonald (1958)

Over the past year or so, I’ve really been getting into the work of Ross Macdonald (he soon dropped the ‘John’, for whatever reason).

Coming on as if Raymond Chandler had knocked the ‘frustrated-literary-novelist’ bit on the head and settled into a routine of knocking out two hard-boiled thrillers per year, the Macdonald books I’ve read thus far have all been absolutely first rate, mixing up the requisite laconic humour and restless plotting with consistently sublime prose and an acute sensitivity for the tragic quirks of human nature, all baked in an atmosphere of creeping malaise and cynicism that is pure mid-century California noir.

If you’re into crime fiction and yet to discover Macdonald, doing so is an experience I can highly recommend.

‘Experience With Evil’ originally appeared in 1953 under the delightful title ‘Meet Me At The Morgue’, and though it doesn’t feature Macdonald’s signature character Lew Archer, I’m nonetheless confident that Pan’s blurb-ists weren't lying when they deemed it “a kidnap mystery for the connoisseur”.

The cover – by our old pal Sam “Peff” Peffer – is of an equally fine calibre (no firearms pun intended), and in fact, finding this book a few months back represented a rare quadruple win for my paperback collection: a great writer, great art, great condition, and a great price (£2). Satisfying!

Soul Pulp: Keller # 1: The Smack Man by Nelson De Mille (Manor Books, 1975)

Bloody hell. As if to demonstrate the scarcity of these ‘blaxploitation pulps’ in my collection, not to mention the frighteningly rabid conservatism prevalent in these ‘70s ‘men’s adventure’ series books, we’re already down to this one for our second (and thus far, final) Soul Pulp post.

Born in 1943, Nelson De Mille began writing series detective books from the mid ‘70s onward and is still writing thrillers at a prolific rate to this day.

Trying to determine exactly how many ‘Keller’ novels he turned out is however complicated by the fact that some if not all of these books seem to have first been published as outings for the author’s on-going character Joe Ryker, and were sometimes credited to his Jack Cannon pseudonym, except when they weren't. For reasons unknown, these Ryker books were then retooled as Keller books, with “Joe Keller” taking over as the protagonist.

From the late ‘80s onward, it seems that De Mille revised and republished all of these books as Ryker novels, and removed all mention of “Keller” from his bibliography, with most online sources following suit. Currently, some ‘Ryker’ books being sold on Amazon even have ‘Keller’ cover art attached to them, so… who knows. I have no idea what was going on with all that, to be honest.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, ‘The Smack Man’ usually seems to be listed as the fourth Ryker book, despite appearing here as the first Keller one.

As to the book itself…. well it seems to be yr standard trudging police procedural business, enlivened largely by frequent and bold use of expletives, detailed drug use and other such tough guy shit, with some rampant misogyny, bone-crunching violence and ugly racial stereotyping thrown in for good measure. As such, there's probably some good, cynical fun to be had here, if you're nasty enough to dig it.

For a pure dose of 1975, just check out this central card ad page and the text that surrounds it. Nice.

Penguin Crime Time / Weird Tales: The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (Penguin, 1966 / originally published 1929)

In general, I feel that the design policy on Penguin Crime paperbacks became far less aesthetically interesting when they began moving toward photo covers from the mid ‘60s onwards. Anyone who has spent time pulling green spines off shelves in British bookshops over the years will no doubt be familiar with those woeful ‘70s editions that just feature ‘still life’ arrangements of handguns, wedding rings, wrist watches and so on posed on somebody’s bedside table.

(Just personal preference I suppose, but god, I hate those covers so much - just looking at them makes me drift into a state of utter boredom, despairing at the tiresome litany of stock detective story props. Such a total contrast to the thrill and mystery generated by the earlier, more modernist / abstract artwork covers I’ve previously shared on this blog…)

Before that nadir though, some of the earlier forerunners of the photo cover were extremely good. William Haggard’s Slow Burner is one of my all-time favourites, and I’ll also make an exception for this startlingly lurid presentation of Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Dain Curse’, wherein Penguin quite uncharacteristically seem to be going all out to sell it as a horror story, complete with bloody knife, thinly veiled boobs and the kind of frothing-at-the-mouth back cover copy you’d be more likely to find on a New English Library horror cheapie from a decade later.

For whatever reason, I skipped over ‘The Dain Curse’ when I made my way through Hammett’s novels in my youth, so when I picked up this edition and learned that it allegedly features the father of hard-boiled fiction mixing up “slaughter” and “hoodoo” in “bizarre, cult-riddled shapes”, I had no choice but to drop everything and read it straight away. Mission accomplished for the ’66 Penguin design team then, And I mean, even if the promises of the cover turn out to be complete hooey, Hammett is always worth reading, right?

And, well… what a peculiar book this is. I was unaware of its episodic publication history when I began reading, so I’ll admit that it came as something of a surprise when the story boiled over into a blood-curdling melodramatic conclusion on about page 45, then promptly started again from scratch in the next chapter following a dry, expositional wrap-up. After this, it swiftly became obvious that, though presented as a continuous novel, ‘The Dain Curse’ actually consists of a number of interlinked short stories, following the same group of core characters through a series of black-hearted capers and genre exercises, with the bad-ass first person narration of Hammett’s nameless Continental Op character holding things together whenever the inter-story continuity gets a bit frayed around the edges (because when that guy tells you what’s what, you tend to believe him, if you want your jaw to remain intact).

Thus, it proves no surprise therefore to discover that ‘The Dain Curse’ was originally published in four monthly instalments in Black Mask magazine, from November 1928 to February 1929. The earlier ‘Red Harvest’ was also published this way of course, but whereas that story functioned well as a self-contained novel (insofar as I remember anyway – it’s been a while since I read it), the connecting tissue linking the stories in ‘The Dain Curse’ is much sketchier, leading to a rather rambling, uneven feel, with a pulpier tone than that found in Hammett’s other full length works.

Heading straight for the index in my long unread copy of Diane Johnson’s ‘The Life of Dashiell Hammett’ (Hogarth Press, 1984), I learn that Hammett himself didn’t seem to hold a high opinion of ‘The Dain Curse’, later describing it as his “silly story”, and losing interest in it almost immediately when he began working concurrently on what became ‘The Maltese Falcon’. It also seems that the book only saw print as a stand-alone volume after editor Harry C. Block had repeatedly pleaded with Hammett to further revise his manuscript, politely presenting the author with a list of ‘recommendations’ that included increasing coherence between the different episodes, eliminating minor characters and digressions entirely and significantly reworking the character of the heroine. To be honest, all of these issues remain pretty problematic in the version that was eventually published, so god knows what kind of a mess things must have been in when Hammett initially submitted his manuscript three revisions earlier.

This all goes some way toward explaining why ‘The Dain Curse’ is by far the least celebrated and least widely read of Hammett’s five novels, I suppose, but it also goes without saying that the book’s awkward narrative flow, which renders it quite hap-hazard and unsatisfying as a detective story, still allows for frequent outbursts of exceptional writing and sheer strangeness that led me to enjoy it quite a bit.

Predictably enough, my favourite part of the book was the second quarter, originally published in Black Mask in December 1928 as ‘The Hollow Temple’. To my surprise, this segment, which seems to have inspired the entirety of Penguin’s design for the book, does indeed see Hammett taking a detour into full-blown horror territory, delivering on the promise of the back cover copy in spades (if only for the space of twenty-something pages).

So, simply put, pages 63 to 98 of ‘The Dain Curse’ represent the most awe-inspiring chunk of weird/pulp prose I’ve read in years, incorporating a reclusive religious cult who pump narcotics through the air-con in their guests’ rooms, secret passages and encounters in the darkness with both sap-wielding thugs and terrifying spectres, a bullet-proof Satanic messiah presiding over a sacrificial altar, and yes, a hypnotised, bloody knife-cradling heroine in a diaphanous nightgown.

Despite the more esoteric subject matter, Hammett’s prose is, as ever, full-blooded and razor-sharp (more literally so here than usual), and the fact that he suddenly begins ploughing through all this in the midst of what is ostensibly a detective story makes it all the more remarkable and unexpected. The passage in which the Continental Op finds himself apparently wrestling with an amorphous, shape-shifting ghost, taking chunks out of the fucker ‘til it *bleeds*, is absolutely staggering – as perfect a realisation of somebody’s “hey, imagine if Dashiell Hammett wrote for ‘Weird Tales’” daydream as could be wished for, rendered with a James/Blackwood-esque descriptive power that no amount of “it was all just knock-out drops and a light show” back-pedalling can sufficiently account for.

It is intriguing to realise that Hammett was clearly an admirer of the genre he is wading into here – he even throws in a cheeky name-check for Arthur Machen - and not even ‘The Hollow Temple’s concluding chapter, in which the rational explanation for everything that transpired is rather awkwardly and tediously outlined, can dampen the memory of the blood-splattered, opium-frazzled power of these pages.

Whilst I’ve always been a fan of Hammett’s work, not to mention the brave stands he took on his beliefs in later life, discovering this full strength detour into weirdsville increases my admiration for him even further. So if, like me, you’ve previously skipped ‘The Dain Curse’ on the basis that it sounds like some kind of fuddy-duddy missing jewels stately home whodunit that nobody seems to rate as much as his other books, now might be as good a time as any to correct that omission, especially if you can track it down with one of the numerous great covers it has inspired over the years.

To that end, let’s conclude with a few I grabbed off the internet; apologies for the low res of some of the images – apparently the standing of this novel remains so low that no one has even much bothered with any decent cover scans. (And yes, James Coburn played the Op in a 1978 TV version – good casting.)